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Evernote for Mac update

In all of the excitement of Wednesday’s announcement, we haven’t had a chance to mention a bunch of nice new features that were a part of the Evernote for Mac and Evernote for Windows updates. This post will focus on Mac, the next one will be about Windows.

Redesigned note info area

The top note info area received a nice tidying up that makes it more intuitive and saves precious real estate.

To expose additional details about your note, click on the arrow. In previous versions, this could only be done by pressing the “More info” icon in the toolbar. (Did you know that you can customize the toolbar? Just right click on it.)

The title area is now a large, clear text field.

The notebook dropdown has been moved up to be aligned with the title, making notebook changes easier.

The date picker displays as a calendar.

Unlike previous versions, the URL is a link. To edit it, click on the pencil icon.

These icons show whether or not the note needs to be synced and if any image and pdf resources in the note have been indexed for recognition.

Hide unassigned tags

There’s a new option under the View menu called “Hide Unassigned Tags.” Checking that option will remove any tags from your tag list that do not apply to your current notebook, search or filter. This is a great way to keep an, otherwise, large tag list nice and tidy. And, if you ever want to see all of your tags, just click on the “Click to Show All Tags” text in the tag list.

This feature is also a good way to search for specific tags. Just start typing the tag name, and watch as unrelated tags disappear. This tip works best for unique tag names that would not show up as text within your notes.

Location names

Most Evernote mobile platforms automatically attach your location to new notes. In the past this information was displaying only as longitude and latitude, which, as it turns out, isn’t all the useful at a glance. So, Evernote now presents that information as the location name. If you want to see or edit the longitude and latitude, simply click on the pencil icon near the location. Clicking on the location opens Google Maps.

Better screen clipping

This feature came out in the previous update, but I neglected to mention it. Clipping screenshots directly into Evernote is much improved. You can activate the screen clipper from either the menu bar elephant or by pressing Control+Command+C. The new cross hair interface makes it easier to align and select a clip of a portion of the screen. If you want to clip an entire application window, simply click in the window without selection. Clipping the window will create a note with the title of that window as the note title. Very convenient.

Fixes and improvements

And, as always, there were lots of other fixes and improvements that make Evernote for Mac run smoother and faster.

For the desktop app, there ought to be a preferences field to allow you set a default location for new notes. For example, any notes created on my computer at work will be geotagged with my work location, and any notes created from my home computer will be geotagged with my home location. That way, all my notes are geotagged, not just the ones created on my phone.

OK, I figured out that if I click CMD-SHIFT-I it will collapse the date / author / location area when creating a new note… that helps immensely. With that collapsed, I can tab directly to the tags field — much better.

More work again!!!! I use Evernote mostly for cutting and pasting info from web pages. Why do I have to paste in the web link when it used to do it automatically before?

Please could you restore this feature or put it as option in preferences. Could you also put in preferences the ability to automatically simplify formatting. Its crazy when I started using Evernote it did all this. Now I have to copy and paste, simplify formatting, and now cut and paste link into panel as well!!!

The new design looks better but why give all this work which wasn’t there before?? I’m sure others see this as hassle also. Please let me know if this issue is being acknowledged…thanks

The very advantage of evernote as an on-the-go archive and a replacement of horrifyingly unstructured bookmark menus is the automatic addition of the URLs. Without this feature, the tool has lost a lot of its workflow-value.

I vote for an Android update, too. Same here, when switched from iPhone I got really disappointed, and that hasn’t been remedied. I think at this point there are enough Android devices on the market to deserve a better app (local content, e.g.).

Looks great! However, it’s still a pain to use tables and bullets on the Mac version. For example, if you cut and paste text from a table, it creates a brand new table, so if you want to cut text from a cell and move it to another cell, you end up with tables within tables. Also, there’s no way to resize tables, there’s no way to edit properties of tables you’ve already created, deleting a row from a table takes a couple of tries, etc. Whenever I make a mistake with a table, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to fix it, and I have to make a brand new table, copy each cell of the table cell-by-cell, and click “Paste without formatting” to get it to paste without being a table within a table. It’s faster to just start over, but that’s incredibly irritating and a big waste of time.

Bullets are the same way: if you try deleting a bullet in a block of bullets, you start getting really weird behavior – one-and-a-half-spaces between bullet items for no apparent reason, messing up all the bullet items above it, etc – and when you try and fix that, for some reason the indentation level of one bullet item is directly tied to the indentation level of the bullet item below it, so trying to edit a bulleted list with multiple indentation levels is a huge pain.

How about adding like three or four buttons for adding columns/rows, or adding better controls over tables? Most decent (and several not-so-decent) WYSIWYG text editors have functional bullets/tables. Or how about (at the very least) adding an add-on in Trunk that can handle tables and bullets in a sane way?

This quote sums it up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123364):

“A first-year CS undergrad student can write an editor with better formatting than Evernote on OS X. I don’t mean to be snarky but it’s terrible to see EN have so much potential only to be excruciating to use.”
– z8000

In addition, when I created a table the lines keep expanding for some unknown reason, and there are now several pages between each line. Very frustrating as it’s something I’d like to use frequently and don’t want to have to re-type!

I don’t know whether this applies to the premium version… but why are is there a row limit of 30.
To think of it its hardly worth even having a table function at this point in time until it can be vastly improved.

Thanks for the update. I can’t remember when it was installed on my Mac, but that does not matter. I am having a problem, which prevents Evernote from syncing… When I click the Sync button in the main application I get the message “attrValue is a required value.”, when I click on the OK button (the only one available) nothing gets synced, because the note I added text to is not changed as I can see through the web interface. What to do?

How ’bout considering a smoother font color change? I am just starting to use Evernote, but would appreciate not having to select a color with every change in a note I write. Did I overlook the instructions?

A small suggestion though: how about having the possibility to set your own thumbnail?
Specially if you type a lot of text, the thumbnail quickly looses its quality as visual reference.
A small area within the note where you could drag and drop one of the pictures that is already in the note, that then would then become the thumbnail, would be awesome.

Since downloading v 1.10, I seem to have lost my access to evernote. ie No icon to click on in the top bar and nothing on the bottom list of applications (Apple mini mac)
Managed to find it in “finder” but cant retain the link.

You keep making an excellent product still better! Here’s my two cents. I’m spending a lot of time these days on Safari for iPad, and I miss being able to capture all or part of a Web page to Evernote. Am I missing something, or will this feature be added?

Again and again, whatever forum you offer I request the same thing, having the ability to nest folders, to have notebooks within folders. I use Evernote everyday and not having this capability is a real handicap for me. I know that you advocate using Tags for organizing, but that is not enough, it just does not work for me visually, which is how I organize myself. I know that I am not alone in this, the world is full of folks who think visually, who think in pictures, and being able to see our nested folders/notebooks is vital to our way of organizing ourselves.

I have been trying for several days to download the Evernote app. and I can’t seem to get the app. to download. I came close once but should it take 9 Hours to download?!!! I just gave up. I’ve tried using Firefox and Safari, I’ve tried multiple web sites ( even the Evernote web site and THAT didn’t work either. It seems to me that the company web site would be THE BEST place to download the app. I hear so many good things about this app. but if I can’t get it to download onto my Mac how will I ever be able to use it?

I would love to try evernote, but I don’t see why I need to update to 10.5.8. There are a lot of mac users that have chosen to stay at 10.5.6. Is there any way you could let users download 1.7.2., so we could try it? I know of quite a few developers that will allow users to download an older stable version so they can try it. I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

This update is useless without sharing. i upgraded to premium specifically because I thought sharing was enabled across all of the Evernote apps, only to find out that it only works on Evernote Web. What a let down.

I recently started using Evernote again on my Mac (previously I have been using it iPhone-only) and I have to say, this UI is *bloated*. For the next update I wish some more possibilities to hide functions!

The latest Safari update no longer supports out Web Clipper plugin. We’re working on a new version which will work in Safari 5.1. In the meantime, you can continue clipping web content by installing our bookmarklet, which is available here: http://www.evernote.com/about/download/web_clipper.php

Still there is the major problem that even with Evernote Premium most of my notes with .pdfs still give the error “not all resources on this note are indexed for searching” — when will this be addressed? .pdfs should be the first thing you guys index?